Discovering Warrants in Political Argumentation

Abstract

Philosophers deny a proposal for actions can be deduced from arguments for or against the proposal because they may be incompatible. Nevertheless, people in general, and politicians especially, make decisions and present arguments they believe are convincing. We studied politicians who made decisions in complex situations. They spoke about possible actions, their consequences, the probabilities of these consequences and their evaluations, but rarely indicated why their arguments led to their choice. We hypothesized implicit argumentation rules involved and checked whether they predicted those choices. We found seven implicit informal logic rules involved. We also found a random sample of people made the same choices based on the same arguments, suggesting basic warrants by which people argue about decisions.

Epistemic Norms for Public Political Arguments

“…The strategy outlined with these premises for proving the optimality of m 1 , namely the pairwise comparison of m 1 with all other relevant options on the basis of a complete value determination of m 1 , is safe-if the necessary information is available-but very laborious and costly. There are simpler strategies such as the incomplete pairwise comparison, in which only those consequences are taken into account that are different for the two options-which, however, presupposes correspondingly favourable circumstances (for further possibilities seeGallhofer & Saris 2021; Lumer 1990: 390-396; 2005c: 248- 250). And one can use other comparison schemes such as transitivity or a knockout system.…”